


soon recover

by irnan



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:43:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony's got this. No, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> More a sort of collection of one-shots than an actual story, though they are in chronological order. Utter mangling of Rumiko Fujikawa's comics canon backstory in the third chapter, as wikipedia informs me. (Still not sorry.)

Tony was doing a Pepper-thing and sitting perched on the edge of his own workbench as he watched Bruce wander around the lab, touching this and examining that, marvelling at the holograms and laughing at the bots. Tony grinned to himself and took another bite of cheeseburger. He was enjoying this, this team-business; it was like having five more Rhodeys to poke at and make smile and relax with, weirdly safe in this new knowledge that they had his back.

Weird because, well, of the top three people in Tony's life whom he'd been convinced would always have his back... one of them was Obie.

"I don't know how you ever even leave here," said Bruce, circling Tony's bike for the sixth or seventh time.

"Pepper," Tony said promptly.

Bruce grinned. "Yeah," he said. "Pepper." There was a wistful tilt to his smile, and Tony would have liked to say something pithy and truthful and encouraging about how he should just give up and call Betty Ross already, but Tony's track record with relationships was... was not good, and therefore his advice was, at best, dubious. Furthermore, he had a pesky little conviction that a man had the right to his own hangups and shouldn't be talked out of them before he was ready.

He was aware that this was not, perhaps, the healthiest of convictions. He was also aware that he was currently applying it in a selective and frankly arbitrary manner, but he was Tony fucking Stark, arbitrary was his middle name. Well, his other middle name.

"So," said Bruce then, too-casual. "Has SHIELD... said anything?"

"You sound," Tony informed him, "like a highschooler asking me if his first crush _like_ -likes him."

Bruce barked a laugh.

"They have not."

Bruce worried at his lower lip with his teeth. "Hmm. That's... that's worrying, I don't know. Natasha said - but I don't trust Fury to stick to her word."

Tony polished off his cheeseburger before he answered that. "Then you're seriously underestimating Director Fury's intelligence," he said. "Not even he's gonna cross the Black Widow."

"You think?"

Tony gave that sceptical statement a consideration it did not deserve. "I think," he said, "which, by the way, is a truth not many people are consciously aware of and will certainly lead to nothing but mockery and derision if and when Rhodey learns of it, I think that Fury will stick by Nat's word even if he's not frightened of her, which he'd be an idiot not to be, because on the whole, he wants the Avengers intact and doesn't much care what that takes."

"The Avengers," Bruce said softly, mockingly, and then laughed. "Listen to us. We're still a time bomb, Tony."

Tony huffed and threw his cheeseburger wrapper at Bruce. It bounced off his shoulder, and Bruce jerked and gave him a mock-stern glare.

"Listen? OK. I'll listen. I'll listen to you slinking around my awesome fucking futuristic lab poking at my stuff like a kid in a candy store and not really believing it's actually in front of you; I'll listen to you waffle over calling Betty Ross, I'll listen to you make dumbass doom-and-gloom pronouncements in the face of all the evidence to the contrary -"

"You are so close to being out of line right now -"

"And you love it, because no one ever is, with you. Shut up. Look, _this_ is your whole problem, right there. You are immensely powerful, Bruce, and not just as the Hulk. You can't afford to pretend you're not."

That silenced him. Tony crossed his arms over his chest, instinctive gesture still not unlearned despite the three years of it making his arc dig into his chest. He dropped them again. It was a damn defensive way to stand anyway, and if there was one piece of Howard's advice that Tony had always taken to heart it was that the best defence was a good offence.

"I've made a decision," he said. "I don't do that often. I - I potter about and I invent stuff and eat cheeseburgers en masse and just generally enjoy my life, or at least I thought that was what I was doing, way back when, but anyway, not here to discuss my hangups, see, though in a way we are because sometimes, sometimes," and Bruce did this thing people did sometimes where they drew back a bit and looked at him different and Tony knew he was wearing the look Pepper called his superhero look. "I make decisions. And I've decided we're gonna work this out and do this right, you and me and Nat and Clint and Thor and Steve. So you can whinge about it if you like, but you're stuck, officially stuck. Better get used to it."

Bruce crossed his arms over his chest as well. "You're not gonna carry this team on your own," he said.

"No," said Tony. "I mean, I could if I had to, you have _literally no idea_ what I can do if I have to, but hey, I'm _not_ going to have to, and you know it."

Bruce sighed. "I kind of hate you."

"I get that a lot."

"Immensely powerful."

"Yes," said Tony. "And if you hide it, people are going to both misuse it and _use your name_ to misuse it."

Bruce had read his file, Tony knew. They had all read each other's files. Anything else would've been criminal negligence, all things considered. Bruce came over to him then, kicked the fallen ball of cheeseburger wrapper into a corner and slouched, like a bored college kid with half a hangover, to Tony's side.

"I can't fight the entire US Army," he pointed out.

Tony sniffed. "You _do_ like to forget who you're talking to," he said.

"Neither can you."

"You're not too fond of cliché aphorisms either."

"Meaning?"

"Safety," said Tony triumphantly, "in numbers."

Pause before: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

"Take what you can and give nothing back."

"That's _Pirates of the Caribbean_."

"I would totally go for Johnny Depp."

"Are you telling me you haven't already?"

Tony heaved a sigh. "Alas, no."

"Man, your reputation's taking a knocking here."

"I guess it is."

That admission seemed to silence the banter, which Tony didn't object to; there was less tension in Bruce's body, and he was smiling a bit. Tony wondered if he'd really needed persuading, or just reassurance that the decision he'd already made was the right one. Not that it made a difference, in the long run.

Then Bruce said, "We're not really calling the helicarrier the Executor, are we?"

"Screw you, yes we are," said Tony. "I consider it a sacred duty," and Bruce started laughing.


	2. Chapter 2

It wasn't every day Tony got back from a business trip - Pepper had done the business, he'd sprawled in obscenely large hotel beds and played kept man - to find the helicarrier under attack. Mind you, he wasn't entirely sure why he was so surprised about it when the alarms went off before he'd even gotten off the main elevator.

"Really?" he said to the ceiling. "Really, now?"

The ceiling, being a ceiling, didn't answer. Tony yanked on the emergency stop button and tore holes in his suit trousers climbing out of the hatch in it - the ceiling, that was. Above him the doors to Deck E glowered in the dimly lit elevator shaft. Tony was just high enough up that he could get a decent grip and force them open. Distantly people were shouting; there was gunfire and smoke and a noise of explosions. This was getting messy, and getting messy fast. When the dust cleared Nick would have to be damn fast on his feet to avoid purges and long rows of questioners and CIA interference. Hell, MI6 interference, or the Germans - what were they called again? Bundes-something? Tony heaved himself up and out of the elevator shaft - as it turned out, not a moment too soon. Below him the doors were being wrenched at, and there was a short angry burst of machine gun fire.

Hell again. If this was an assassination attempt...

He needed a computer console, and a line to Pepper. He got both down corridor E-29, past the dead bodies of an agent he'd seen in the mess not three weeks ago, and one of their attackers. Tony paused, considering; silence on this corridor at least, except for the wailing of the alarms. He grabbed the corpse of their attacker and rolled him over. Hmm. Black, black and black on black, the traditional supervillain uniform, well-made, not as good as Tony's - as the equipment Tony didn't make anymore. Balaclava. Tony didn't strip that off, suddenly unwilling to see the guy's face. He'd bled out pretty quick once the bullet had hit his femoral artery in his left leg. Mind you, that was an interesting gun, what with the blue glowy bits.

Tony scooped it up. Then, because he didn't yet know how it worked, he took the dead SHIELD Agent's nine-mil as well.

"Thanks," he said quietly to the corpse, refusing to feel like an idiot for doing so.

Anyway, computer consoles. Comms were down, security was down, everything was down, oh my God. Tony hooked his phone up so Jarvis had an in and called Pepper before he did anything else. She wasn’t picking up – oh, was it that meeting thing, the monthly whatever at accounting? – so he left her a message.

“Hi, honey, listen, the Executor’s been attacked so, um, I won’t be home for dinner. Don’t wait up.” And then, a heartbeat later, “It’ll be OK.”

Step Two was getting into SHIELD’s security server, checking for feeds, pulling up the floor plan with the heat sensors: right. No feeds – wait – flicking pictures on the main deck, on the bridge, in the main hangar, but otherwise someone had knocked the cameras out.

This was starting to look like an inside job to Tony. He flipped to the heat sensors, found his own position: no one close. There were scattered clutches of people moving above and below him, six weak signals on the bridge, more people in the lower hangar, standing hunched together and being circled ominously by several more signals, a cluster of signals moving with determination across B-Deck, not far from the science labs.

They had planned this well. The Executor was on standby; they weren’t even in the air. They weren’t even out of sight of New York. Duty rosters – yes. Only a quarter of the usual crew aboard, the absolute minimum to keep the thing going    

 _Definitely_ an inside job. This wasn’t Loki, hitting them with all hands on board because he wanted as many people dead as he could possibly manage. This was someone who wanted…

Tony’s eyes were drawn back to that purposefully moving cluster of signals by the science labs. They’d moved on, grown larger – hostages? Tony was afraid so – heading, now, past the main elevator shaft and the barracks level, oh, _oh_ , they were headed for the storage level. They wanted alone time with the R&D guys and the boxes of classified whatever-it-was that Fury kept down there.

Well, fuck that. Tony felt a bit indignant. What the hell, these were _his people_.

What the hell was in that storeroom that these assholes appeared to want? If it was more Phase Two Tony would blow the Executor sky-high himself, no matter how fond he was of the creaking bucket.

Of course, the other possibility was that the purposefully-moving cluster of heat signatures was his people, getting out of the labs - but there was no one left in there now and why would they head downstairs like that? The armouries were in the other direction. Tony paused, indecisive for a heartbeat. Steve or Nat or Clint would -

But he wasn't Steve or Nat or Clint. Now was not the time to start re-designing his crisis-thinking. Tony would do what he had always done in a tight spot: follow his gut instincts. And right now his gut was telling him that that cluster of heat signatures on the storage level was Very Bad News.

He needed a gun - a proper gun, one he actually knew how to use and what it would do when he did. It was too late to try and get back upstairs to reach the suit. It would have to come to him - if he found a window. Deck E: three levels above storage and one above the barracks; there were armouries east and north of him but that would take him too far from the storage access elevator, he couldn't risk it if he wanted to find out what they were doing down there. Wait, barracks.

Six minutes later Tony Stark had hidden the attacker's uncomfortably Phase Two-like weapon behind a wall panel, where he could come back for it if Fury tried to keep him away from the others, and was raiding Clint Barton's SHIELD-issued quarters. Nat's was next door, and she'd have guns as well, but Tony wasn't sure he'd ever be able to look her in the face again if he went through her stuff, which... OK, whatever? But he wouldn't ever have gone through Pepper's either, before they were together, or, come to think of it, Rumiko's back at MIT...

Anyway, Clint had a couple spare handguns (a couple, really?), a silencer, scopes, a whole case of nasty-looking knives, unless they were Nat's, something that looked (sickeningly) like wire meant for, you know, garrotting people, and finally, in a second case next to the empty one for his bow - empty, great, he was on board, that was a step up, Tony felt something like a sense of comfort making itself known in his chest, which, again, whatever, but apparently it came with the teamwork territory that knowing you could do shit for yourself didn't mean you weren't relieved to find you didn't have to, this was an awkward sort of non-revelation that Tony wasn't prepared to think about - anyway, in a second case next to the empty one for Clint's bow, there sat a well-used but pristinely-kept SI 5-25 sniper rifle.

"Ah," said Tony, and grinned.

He could assemble that thing blindfold, drunk out of his mind and with one hand tied behind his back. Rhodey had photos. From there it was a hop, skip, two flights of stairs, one bludgeoned enemy agent (bludgeoned with the stock of the rifle, that was) and three security doors to the relevant store rooms.

And that shit was definitely Phase Two.

Jarvis was muttering imprecations in Tony's ear; it wouldn't be long, Tony felt, before he moved on to slurs on his creator's sanity and undermining of Tony's life choices.

He was stupidly proud.

Anyway, the store room was a long hall-like place, with three levels of shelving, for lack of a better word. Tony had snuck in through the left side door on the middle level, and moved over the metal grating as silently as he could, edging between two packing crates to get a look at the scene on the main floor below: four guys in lab coats, two SHIELD agents sprawled unconscious on the floor, a collection of black-clad mercenary-looking types with the interesting weapons with the blue glowy bits.

Tony really needed a better name for them than that.

"- and grab everything you can," one of them was saying. The others weren't so much collecting the Phase Two weapons as stripping them; they were building a sort of cairn of the things, Tony thought. Behind the plastic and metal alloy casings that were piling up on the floor, a blue glow was rising. "It looks like they weren't lying about the Cube. Pile it up over there and we can -"

"What?" said someone in a lab coat, and Tony winced when he saw it was Bruce. Uh-oh. At least he wouldn't die if they shot him for being too mouthy, which of course was more than you could ever have said for Tony himself. "You're not going to be able to transport them all out of here. You don't have the resources."

Leader Guy, who had an accent that sounded almost South African, turned to look at him. "Shut up," he said, as casually as if he were talking to a dog.

Bruce grimaced, but he did shut up - clearly not ready to let the Hulk out in a relatively confined space like this, and a space which, if Tony remembered that schematic right, was currently below the water line, too.

He shifted his hand on the sniper rifle, thinking if he was lucky he could catch the light on his watch, but the angles were wrong, and the lights were too dim. Leader Guy was coming back, gun in his hand; he grabbed a lab guy at random and held it to his head. Tony twisted to catch a glimpse of the guy's face, and grinned to himself. Clint in a lab coat, who'd've thought, Tasha would kill him if he didn't get pictures, oh boy. Leader Guy was half way through a question about the other storage levels when something creaked on the floor not far from him. Tony swallowed hard, but he put the rifle down, very gently, and reached for the handgun: the handgun with Clint's silencer on it. He shifted uncomfortably for a better position, and raised the gun, and found himself looking at Steve.

Tony glared at him.

Steve grinned. "Nice," he mouthed.

"Clint's," Tony breathed. "They're after Phase Two."

"No transport," Steve muttered back.

"Explosive," said Tony. Steve understood him instantly: using Phase Two to blow a hole in the Executor would sink her faster than the Titantic, and it might even look like an accident if these guys knew what they were doing.

"OK," he muttered. "How'd you get here?"

"Heat signatures." Downstairs they were wrenching at the doors into storage 3. Clint still had a gun to his forehead. He wasn't doing a very good impression of a terrified but harmless scientist; he looked, rather, like what he was: a murderously angry superspy assassin. A couple of the attackers appeared to have noticed it. Leader Guy at least was watching him closely. "You?"

"Bruce's lab," Steve answered, so low Tony barely caught it. "Left his screen up. It was that programme you built for tracking the Tesseract."

This time it was Tony's turn to catch on without further elaboration. "Gamma radiation in the weapons." He paused, considering, and swapped the handgun for the 5-25 while he did so, smoothing his fingers over the familiar lines of it, the weight and heft and grace of it. "Maybe we should let them blow the Phase Two." Anything to get rid of the stuff. 

They did not have time to be pissed all over again that Fury had lied to them about destroying the things.

Steve paused. "You wanna sink the Executor."

Tony grinned.

Steve sighed.

"Not sink," said Tony quietly. "Just. Damage. A little. Thor and Tasha here?"

Steve nodded. "With our friends upstairs."

"OK. They need Hill, they need to get to the bridge. Blow the Phase Two, let the water in, lift the Executor out of the water. Seal off this level. Thor and I can get everyone out whom we want out."

Steve was considering it. Steve was thinking - Tony could read it in his face - this is stupid and foolhardy and utterly dangerous. Steve was thinking, this'll be fun.

"We wouldn't have to come far out of the water," said Tony. He was not wheedling.

"We're within sight of New York, wouldn't there be a tidal wave?"

"Well, then, someone'll have to get out and push us out."

Steve bit back a grin. "Can the Hulk swim?"

"I don't know," said Tony, grinning hugely. "Let's find out."

Steve knocked the back of his hand against Tony's upper arm and slipped off again to comm the others. Tony twisted back to his vantage point above the drama that should have been unfolding below, but wasn't really. They'd gotten into the other store room; Clint was still motionless, Bruce was beginning to pace, just a bit, quick jerks from side to side that their friendly neighbourhood terrorists were putting down to panic and not, as Tony knew would be more accurate, to the effort of holding back the Hulk. He wished he could find a way to ask him how much time they had, maybe offer -

Comfort, like Bruce was a kid with a nightmare, scared of the thing in his closet? Well, maybe. Tony knew what it was like to not have that.

"Not too much," said Leader Guy, keeping an eye - as well as his gun - on Clint. So Tony'd been right. It was meant to look like an accident.

They go to the labs first to retrieve schematics, plans, research. Then they wreck SHIELD's own stockpile and sink the Executor while they're at it. They're not being subtle, they're not expecting to leave survivors, any more than Tony was expecting to find his team here.

The other question, the one he was not thinking about right now because there wasn't time, was this: what was Phase Two doing on the Executor in the first place? Why wasn't it in Nevada, or at HQ in New York?

So many questions, so little time...

They were converging on the piles of weapons now; one of them had a device that - Tony didn't care, he'd figure it out later. Not enough material for a radioactive fallout, but more importantly, Leader Guy was turning to Clint, and his people were lining up, and Tony understood then that they'd shoot Bruce and Clint and the two other scientists and the agents, trusting the explosion to hide the evidence of the shootings.

No survivors.

He'd moved before he thought about it, settling the 5-25, taking aim. Careful, said Howard's voice in his ear the way it always did when he handled a gun. Calm down. All the time in the world. Squeeze the trigger, don't pull.

The only thing they'd done together during Tony's adolescence that hadn't ended in a furious argument: it felt right, twenty years later, to still carry that with him, to hold that one part of his father close.

Leader Guy straightened. Clint clenched his hands, just briefly, by his sides, and Tony had sparred with him enough that he knew that meant he was about to move, because even Clint had a tell if you knew what you were looking for, and Tony squeezed the trigger and Leader Guy staggered as the bullet punched through his temple. Six different people shouted in surprise, but none of them was Clint, who was already moving, catching the corpse and using it as a shield while he uncurled dead fingers from around the gun. Tony shot another merc, and a third.

"Bruce, hold it!" he yelled.

"Oh, thanks for the _advice_ , Tony!"

"Don't smartass me," Tony said, knowing Bruce couldn't hear him. Clint was crouched behind a crate directly underneath Tony now; Bruce and the others had disappeared on the other side.

"Tony, one more?" Clint yelled.

"Get outta here!" Tony bellowed back. "We're gonna try a little something."

And when he was sure that Clint and Bruce were out and had taken the others with them, he pulled up again on his knees, and balanced the rifle, and thought, if this doesn't work I'm gonna look like a fucking idiot, and fired at the detonator for the makeshift bomb they'd built out of the stripped-down Phase Two weapons. Then, clutching Clint's precious rifle, he bolted for the door.

The explosion didn't exactly shake the _whole_ Executor, but it was certainly bigger than Tony had thought it would be. He needed to re-examine those damn weapon schematics, he thought muzzily as the edge of a blast wave knocked him through the door and against the corridor wall five feet away; they hadn't diluted the Tesseract power as much as Fury's goons had claimed. Things were falling in the storage room, rather loud things, and there was a steady, horrifying rushing noise that he only slowly realised was inrushing water. Already he thought the corridor was starting to tilt, but let's be honest here, that might just have been his (probable) concussion...

Now, to get up. He was trying to work out how to use the 5-25 to lever himself upright when someone's hands caught at him.

"Tony! Jesus, you lunatic. You're sinking the Executor, we gotta get outta here, come on, come on!"

Tony let Clint drag him up, staggered, nearly fell, caught himself again. "It's OK, I'm OK, let's go."

Clint didn't let go of his arm. Bruce, shaking but steady, was waiting for them by the far elevator to the upper levels. "Set up the shutdown, when we get upstairs the level will seal itself off," he said.

"S'OK," said Tony again. "We're lifting up."

"You're joking," said Bruce.

"Hole in the hull won't stop it flying."

"Lunatic," said Clint again, but his time he sounded fond. They fell into the elevator together, feeling they should be breathing like they'd run a marathon as the lift shuddered and began the ascent. No, wait, the whole Executor had shuddered. Lift-off!

"Anybody gonna make the light speed joke?" he said. "Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?"

Over the top of his head he could tell Bruce and Clint were looking at each other. Neither of them said anything until Tony straightened and moved and let the rifle hang off his shoulder and Clint jumped a mile and said, carefully calm, "You kidnapped my 5-25."

"It's a dilapidated piece of junk metal that's twenty years out of date and was far surpassed by about half a dozen models six months after it hit the market," Tony proclaimed.

"ASSHOLE, it's a pristinely kept high-precision piece of tech that represents the best bit of engineering in the history of modern warfare," Clint bellowed; then, catching sight of Tony's widening grin, he added, "Not that I have any idea _what the fuck_ you were _on_ when you designed it -" and all three of them started laughing.

They staggered out onto the bridge to find a small collection of bodies, one live merc tied to a chair, Hill in charge, Steve and Thor on a line to Fury and Natasha cleaning a vicious-looking knife. Various other people in various states of minor injuries were scurrying around, but Tony wasn't interested in anyone not on his team.

"Boys," she said, giving them a quick but very thorough once-over. "No major injuries. Tony, you've got a concussion."

"Blast," he said. "Downstairs. Bigger'n I thought."

"Sit," she ordered. He did. Clint pried his fingers off the rifle and slung it over his own shoulder.

"The funeral," said Tony.

"What?" Clint looked down at him.

"What I was on," he said. "The funeral. Week after. Took six days."

Before anyone could say anything else, Fury's voice boomed out of the speakers over the comm link. "Mercenaries," he said, disgusted. "Nice to know my irrational hatred of these types isn't in fact all that irrational. Which one of them was it who blew the hole in the Executor?"

Steve and Tony studiously avoided looking at each other.


	3. Chapter 3

It would be a lie to say that Tony did his best work under pressure, but it certainly wouldn't be untrue to suggest that he occasionally needed a bit of a push before he'd knuckle down to anything he didn't enjoy, or find compellingly necessary. Certainly it said a lot about his feelings on his former work that, after Afghanistan, the Missed Deadline Chart that had hung on his workshop wall for the better part of twenty years had become mostly obsolete.

Talk about a congenital inability to take a hint.

Anyway, yeah, not his best work under pressure, because Tony tended to consider the latest version of the suit his best work, and he hadn't done any of that under pressure in quite a while, but things were looking down again, as they had a way of doing when Rhodey came over and tried to talk him into doing shit that was so far out of Tony's comfort zone it was on fucking Asgard.

"Tell me how you really feel, Tony," said Rhodey. "I'm not sure I followed your argument about how this is _all my fault_."

"You are not seriously trying to deny that this was _your_ plan," said Tony, crawling further up into the frame of the support structure around the makeshift hull meant to one day become an arc reactor. "You were the one who turned up at my Tower at the crack of dawn and broke my coffee machine and _fanboyed embarrassingly_ at Captain America over pancakes -"

"Shut up, you fanboy at him over everything," said Rhodey. "Who was it that wanted to come in here and have a look at this thing themselves?"

"Who dragged me to New Mexico in the first place?" Tony demanded, prying the casing open with the screwdriver and undoing his shirt buttons so his own arc would light up the wires he needed to cut through.

"I didn't suggest _this_ ," said Rhodey.

"You got drool on the shield," said Tony remorselessly.

"You keep a replica of it in your workshop as a good luck charm," said Rhodey.

"That is totally justified," said Tony. "Or have you forgotten the Astrophys 101 debacle of eighty -"

"TONY, we have a moratorium on conversations about the Astrophys 101 debacle -"

"We had to bribe the TA with my Captain America action figures," said Tony.

"You got them back," said Rhodey.

"I stole them back," said Tony, "three years later, and with absolutely _no_ help from you."

"The way I remember it," said Rhodey, "I spent most of that evening handcuffed to the steering wheel of Rumiko's car with half a TARDIS on the roof rack while you two - you know, twenty years later and I still don't know what exactly it was that you were doing in there."

Tony grinned to himself in the dimness. There was a comment about how gentlemen never kissed and told, and Rhodey would kill himself laughing at the idea of Tony being a gentleman, and Tony would get to be righteously offended and act stricken all afternoon, but right now there was also the irrefutable fact that if he didn't cut the power to the monitoring stations they'd be announcing unauthorised tinkering with the reactor and the security systems in about ten more minutes and if that happened all his spoiled drunken industrialist acting would be for absolutely nothing because everyone's covers would be irretrievably blown and he'd never live it down in front of Nat and Clint. Also, cutting out the reactor monitoring system would in fact _crash_ the security system, because whoever designed this facility might well have been clever, but wasn't very sensible, and that, as the saying went, was where the fun would begin.

Not that Rhodey knew that yet. Tony grinned harder.

Snip.

"Tony?" said Rhodey's voice. "Tony, you still in there?"

"Hmm?" said Tony. "Working, sweetheart. Just a minute."

He thought he heard Rhodey laughing to himself.

OK, maybe this whole gig wasn't _actually_ out of Tony's comfort zone at all. Not that Rhodey needed to know - oh, hell, he probably already did.

That was the problem with being _competent_ in _public_.

 

*********

 

So the Astrophys 101 debacle of eighty-something began like this:

"Oh my God, you blew it up!" yelled the TA.

"Oh my God, that was awesome," said the pretty fresher from Tokyo.

"Oh my God, I'm calling your Mom," said Rhodey.

"Oh my God, you're the first sensible person I've talked to in six weeks," said Tony to the pretty fresher from Tokyo.

"Show me how you did that," said the pretty fresher from Tokyo.

"Never mind his Mom, call campus security!" shouted the TA.

"I need a drink," said Rhodey.

 

*********

 

Rumiko: the pretty fresher from Tokyo. Rumiko, Ru, _his_ Ru, except not, except she was never anyone's, just like Tony wasn't anyone's either, so of course they were the perfect fit.

(In too many ways.)

 

*********

 

There's a pretty simple reason why he and Rumiko crashed and burned as badly as they did:

Tony hit twenty, and woke up the day after to find twenty had hit back with a fucking vengeance, that Mom and Dad had been dead for three years and nothing was going to bring 'em back or change the way they'd been when they were alive; Tony's family had always been a mess and would always be a mess because he would never get the chance to prove to Dad by word or deed that he wasn't a goddamn disappointment; there would never be the great epic fight to end all fights where the truth came out and Howard stopped in his tracks and was horrified at everything Tony yelled at him and then said things like _no Tony no, nothing you do could ever disappoint me, I'm sorry, so sorry, that I ever made you feel that way_ , and Tony was half way through this speech to the toilet bowl when it hit him like a side of bricks that he was throwing his own fucking chance to prove _everything_ to _everyone_ away by hiding like this instead of telling the Board that yes, all those designs had come from him, and the campaign concept had been his as well as Obie's, and speaking of Obie he wasn't a kid anymore and didn't need protecting from the public or the company or the empty mansion or Mom's earrings still lying on her dresser gathering dust or Dad's empty study, even more accusing than the man himself.

He might, quietly, have had a sense that Obie's idea of protecting Tony while he grieved basically amounted to shutting Tony away, not unlike the first Mrs Rochester in the attic - he could act out if he wanted but no one would take any notice of him up here - but that wasn't fair: hadn't Obie always been there for him? He wanted what was best for Tony, always had, and if what Tony needed was to act out and let loose for a few years, then Obie would see that Tony had the space to do that.

But anyway, the day after his twentieth birthday Tony decided that what he needed was _his goddamn company back_ , thank you very fucking much and amen, and Ru decided that responsibility - even, or especially, struggling too-young-for-it no-real-idea-what-I'm-doing responsibility - was a _really_ _unattractive_ look on Tony.

In those words, too, which went a certain way to explaining - although they probably (certainly) didn't excuse - the way he'd yelled at her that she'd start regretting all the effort she was putting in to pissing her parents off once they were both dead, and that he was looking forwards to her grovelling goddamn apology once they were.

 _Looking forwards_.

Yeah.

He was thirty-five before he called to apologise. She told him he was a dick. Then she told him he wasn't wrong. Then she told him she was sorry too. There was mutual telephonic sniffling for a good few minutes.

Then, because Ru was still Ru even when she's thirty-eight and happily engaged and had, by all reliable accounts, mended her relationship with both her parents to the best of her not inconsiderable ability, she told him to put his sorry ass in rehab and ask the famous Pepper Potts out because dear God that woman is smoking and you adore her don't think I can't tell and I cannot believe you're not tapping that already, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU TONY you'd put the moves on me before you were even sixteen.

Tony hung up before he did anything _really_ dangerous, like tell her she was his first or something.

(Three years after that he does rehab in a cave in Afghanistan. It doesn't really stick, but it's not without effect, either. Bruce says he has an addictive personality type and that he's not actually sure that Tony being addicted to flying weaponised suits and stopping giant alien tentacle monsters from chewing on Manhattan is all that better than alcohol, but both he and Tony know it is.)

 

*********

 

Rhodey refused to take sides in that argument, by the way - Tony was a dick, he said, but he was doing the right thing taking the company back. As far as Tony knows, they don't still talk.

Much.

 

*********

 

Anyway, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Howard and Maria Stark's deaths Pepper is in Malibu for an emergency and Tony is being baby-sat by Captain America, the Norse God of Thunder, two ninja superspy assassins and Bruce, who at least has had the common decency to turn off all the Christmas movies and dig up something nice and loud and familiar.

Tony hasn't spent this day anywhere close to sober in twenty-five years. He's not sure how he feels about the fact that he's only on his second drink. On the one hand: tomorrow is looking up already. On the other: he's not drunk, and he can't remember why not.

And then the elevator opens up and Jarvis says, "Sir, Miss Rumiko Fujikawa," and everyone else sort of scrambles about in surprise - Clint is reaching for his damn gun - and Tony says, "Oh, fuck off."

Ru throws herself onto the couch next to him and crosses her legs at the knee. "It's a sad sad day for the human race when a girl has to invite herself to Tony Stark's private penthouse," she says and lights herself a cigarette. She's still smoking those God-awful English Silk Cut things. "Ugh, you've gone grey. That's disgusting."

Tony gives her a concentrated once-over usually reserved for car engines and the suit. "Oh my God, surgery scars," he says.

"Ahahaha," says Ru. "You should see my mother. Actually, don't." She dimples. Still stupidly charming. "So come on. Do I get an introduction to the famous Avengers?"

"You can get a kick up the ass on your way out of the door," says Tony, slumping deeper into the couch cushions.

"It's not nice to sulk at me just because you've run out of hair dye," says Ru serenely. "Where's Pepper Potts? I've come to grovel at that woman's feet in wordless admiration."

"You're gonna have to settle for Rhodey," says Tony, "who is due to arrive any minute now."

"One day I will work out what it is with you two and Ferris Bueller," says Ru, using the Silk Cut to gesture at the TV screen.

"One day I will work out what it is with you and Ma Frattelli," says Tony.

"I think she's a righteous dude," says Ru, grinning.

"Avengers vote," says Clint. "By a show of hands please: we like her? All in favour? Great."

 

*********

 

She calls him up on Christmas Eve and says, "I should have come to find you after Afghanistan."

It's three a.m. and Pepper is asleep next to him. Tony shifts against her warmth, her strength. He doesn't want to wake her, but it's still stupidly, amazingly good to get to touch her, hold her. Faintly he can chase the scent of yesterday's perfume still on her skin. "No," he says. "No, you shouldn't have."

Rumiko sighs. Tony doesn’t.

"You're really gettin' married tomorrow."

"You think he's a dick?"

"No. I think you are."

"Aaaaand you're still not wrong."

He says, "If I was -" and doesn't know how to finish, because it's a question he's got no right to and one he doesn't want answered, not him. Twenty-year-old Tony wants it, but Tony fucking Stark doesn't.

"If we both weren't," says Rumiko. They're silent then, breathing at each other over the phone, over thousands of miles of the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean. Is it dawn where she is, daylight already? Tony doesn't want to put the effort in to work it out. Her American accent has smoothed away at the edges after all this time, all the effort she put into its deliberate cultivation wasted.

 _Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted_. Who was it that said that? Pepper will know.

"Hey," Ru says at last, slow and tired.

"Good luck today," he says.

"Thanks. Thanks, Tony. Hey. Can I have a suit?"

"Screw you, no," says Tony. "You've still got my Captain America action figures."

She laughs softly - more softly than he can ever remember really hearing from her - and says, "Bye, Tony."

Tony hangs up so she doesn't have to, curls back around Pepper, weightless, warm, near-dreaming, happy.

 

*********

 

Three weeks later a package arrives for him: it's his action figures.

 

*********

 

"Well, this is new," says Rhodey.

"Yeah it’s new," says Tony, fiddling with his phone. "Very new. I mean, usually I'm the one who's being kidnapped and-or assassinated by giant semi-sentient attack robots. Remember Rio?"

"How could I _forget_ ," says Rhodey, snapping a second clip into his gun. "Listen, I don't know how fast Jarvis can get the suits here -"

"Very shortly," says Tony. "Hey, why would someone wanna kill-or-kidnap you?"

Rhodey looks shifty. "Well."

"Either 'fess up to me or 'fess up to Captain America."

"It's _classified_."

Tony's indignant. "I'm a goddamn Avenger!"

Rhodey stares at him.

"What!"

"You're an Avenger."

"Did you miss that memo? I'm sure you didn't miss that memo. I'm sure I told you all about it after the huge fucking battle against the giant alien earthworms that tried to eat Manhattan and trashed my Tower, how did you miss that, that was months ago."

"You're an Avenger," Rhodey repeats; he's grinning now. "Not _I'm Tony fucking Stark_. I'm a _goddamn Avenger_. That's - I don't even. That's fantastic. That's _hilarious_ , man."

"Whatever," says Tony. "Take your stupid smug face someplace else. Robots are _shooting at us_. Again."

That's when the top of the table they're crouching behind gets mostly blown off and one prospective kidnabot (that’s totally going in Merriam-Webster) gets a mystic Norse hammer to the head and then it's all hand to hand and general nastiness.

But Tony's OK, he's got this, they're winning – they’re winning, and he's OK.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, not quite chronological? I feel like there could be a coherent plot here somwhere, but I think I'm too lazy to sort it out. And I kind of like the oneshots.

"You're still going over those Phase Two schematics?" asks Bruce quietly. Tony hmms and shifts his shoulders, hunched over the desk as he peers at the screens around it. He's been down here too long, probably, but Phase Two won't let him go. It pisses him off, makes him jumpy, draws him in, back and back to the schematics and the test results and Steve's old sketches, Howard's research notes, on the HYDRA weapons of so long ago.

 

"Tony."

 

"I know. Getting there."

 

Bruce sighs. "No, you're not."

 

Tony drums his fingers on the desktop. He doesn't, however, deny it. The things are powered by, and use, a technology so far over Tony's head it's indistinguishable from magic. He has as much hope of working out how the Tesseract works as he does of actually understanding what the Phase Two weapons are. Tony hates people who build shit that kills others without having an actual understanding of what they've done, people who blunder around in graceless oversized tin cans without any intelligent thought behind them - only power and a need to destroy.

 

(Is it better to be feared or respected, and why can't you ask for both? Well, in Tony's experience the trouble is that if all you are is feared, people don't respect you.)

 

Bruce grabs a chair and draws it up to sit beside him. Their shoulders brush, and his hands are as quick across the screens and holograms as Tony's own, spinning out diagrams and sliding through long tables of test results.

 

"If you're not careful, this'll turn into a personal vendetta."

 

Tony grins. "It already is."

 

Howard's research notes make it personal. Steve's memories make it personal.

 

Tony's decision, years ago now, to shut down the weapons manufacturing division of SI makes it personal. Fury still has his uses, but one day those will probably run out, and then... well, then. Tony didn't fight so long and so hard to turn his company around in order to get roped into reporting to a guy who'll stoop to making ruthless use of the very things Tony himself refuses to be a part of anymore.

 

Fury really should have thought of that before he got Tony involved with the Avengers.

 

"Uh-huh," says Bruce. "What are you going to do about it?"

 

Tony shrugs. "Use him till he stops being useful, and wreck these beauties" - he flicks his fingers at the research on the screens - "every way I can."

 

"We might need them," says Bruce.

 

Tony's so astonished he almost falls off his chair. There's a sharp-edged silence.

 

"Tell me," he says softly, "that you don't mean that."

 

Bruce won't look at him. "I don't know that I can. Listen. Thor said that they were proof to all the realms that we were ready for a higher form of war."

 

Tony remembers.

 

"What are we?"

 

"What are who?" Tony says evasively. He sees where this is going. It's not a pretty place. In his imagination it resembles a cave in Afghanistan.

 

"The Avengers," says Bruce. "What are we, Tony, if not a weapon? A nuclear deterrent ten times more powerful than a human army outfitted with these things? Steve already faced one of those, and he destroyed them with a handful of men and a vibranium shield. And then the six of us turned back an alien invasion, Tony. Just us. Just six people. You said Fury called us a response team. We're not. We're a weapon of mass destruction."

 

Tony rubs his hands over his face and blinks hard. The air down here is getting stale, and his eyes ache when he closes them. "You've been talking to Hill."

 

"You nearly killed yourself trying to find someone to hold you accountable for what you've done," Bruce pointed out. "Who's going to hold us accountable, Tony?"

 

"No one," says Tony. "There isn't anyone - not for me, not for any of us." He sighs. "Only each other, if that's a good enough answer for you."

 

Bruce takes a moment to think about this, which might sort of hurt, because they turned back an alien invasion together and what's the point of that if it doesn't leave you with unstinting unhesitating trust in each other etcetera etcetera, but he's only being sensible, and Tony has been making an effort to be sensible about this entire business.

 

"I guess it is," says Bruce. "I guess it has to be."

 

"Seriously though," says Tony. "Who the hell else are you going to trust to hold a Norse God, two super-assassins, the Hulk and Tony fucking Stark accountable except Captain America?"

 

Bruce laughs out loud, surprised, eased. "And these?" he asks, nodding at the screens Tony hasn't turned off yet.

 

"Like I said," says Tony. "Ruin them, ruin all of it. Fury can have us, or he can have his peashooters. He doesn't get both."

 

"Hmm. I guess that's fair. You wanna talk to the others about this?"

 

Tony wonders. "I don't know," he says. "Romanov and Barton..."

 

"Only one way to find out," says Bruce.

 

*********

 

"Yeah, I knew about it," says Barton. "And no, I wasn't hugely impressed."

 

"You don't seem hugely worried, either," says Tony.

 

"Fury's been my CO for longer than you've been running around in that suit, Stark," Barton points out. "I trust him."

 

Tony's eyes narrow. "With what?"

 

Barton's jaw unhinges when he tries to answer. Then he barks a laugh, caught out and unashamed. "I guess we'll have to sit on it," he says, "and wait and see if you cross the line or not."

 

Tony wants to grin, but he bites it back. "You're breaking my heart, Barton," he says. "Look at this, I invite you into my Tower, I feed you, I fix your arrows, you're way over my line, buddy, way over."

 

Barton claps him on the shoulder and smiles. No, he's right, they're not there yet, but dammit they will be, and they both know it - which, Tony finds, is a strangely pleasant feeling.

 

*********

 

"I'm sorry," says Natasha. "I'm trying to work out if you're asking me to somehow betray my commanding officer, Dr Banner."

 

Bruce rolls his eyes before he stops to think. "The idea of you having a commanding officer, Agent Romanov..."

 

Natasha quirks her eyebrows at him.

 

"Come on. I think you do what you want just as much as Tony."

 

She almost smiles. "Well, I'm flattered. No, don't say anything else. You've made your case."

 

"And you'll decide..."

 

"When I decide," she says. "I've been a weapon since I was a child, Bruce. The right agent in the right place at the right time... I know all about being used - whether by someone I trust or not."

 

There it is again. I did. Since I was a child.

 

It makes him angry. She's hardly thirty.

 

Isn't she?

 

And then, in a fit of sudden insight and memory of files read by dim airplane-bulbs on a flight over the Atlantic, with this woman's gun (almost) on him, Bruce says, "So does Tony."

 

"You, on the other hand, have quite a bit of practice at avoiding that very thing," says Natasha.

 

"So," says Bruce.

 

"So you'll forgive me for taking a minute to decide if we're the right agents in the right place at the right time."

 

Bruce nods slowly. It's the same thing he asked Tony earlier. "One thing?"

 

"Yes?"

 

"If not us, who?"

 

Natasha smiles sharp and quick, and he knows then that he's not spoken to her about anything she hasn't already thought about. Bruce ducks his head, feeling embarrassed to have come wandering in here acting as though he and Tony are the first and the only ones to have actually put some thought into what they are, who they intend to become.

 

"Yeah. Uh, see you at dinner?"

 

Christ, he sounds like a high school moron making a fool of himself in front of one of the far cooler kids he wants to impress.

 

But Natasha nods and says, "Should be fun," so maybe they have impressed her, a little.

 

*********

 

"I can only offer you my advice," says Thor. "Don't do it."

 

"Well, that's pretty clear and unequivocal advice," says Tony cheerfully.

 

"It is," Thor agrees, grinning back. "The Chitauri attack has drawn enough attention to your world. If you continue to research or to build on the powers involved in that battle it will be noticed."

 

"So," says Steve. "Sit back down quietly and turn your face away - then they'll leave you alone."

 

Thor frowns a bit. "In a manner of speaking," he says.

 

"Uh huh. That's what they used to say about the schoolyard bullies."

 

"Ah," says Tony. "But that's not it, is it?"

 

Steve cuts his eyes over to him, gaze steady but guarded, and Tony thinks he looks as though he were waiting for an attack, a bomb to go off, a punch to be thrown at him: not frightened, but surely wary. "Isn't it?"

 

Tony smiles. "There's still us."

 

Something gives in Steve when he says that; Captain America barks a laugh and rubs his hand over his face in a strangely familiar gesture. It takes Tony a moment to realise that Dad used to do that too, press the knuckle of his thumb against the corner of his eye, rub at the stubble on his jaw.

 

Rhodey does that sometimes - spends a few days with Tony and starts imitating his gestures, his movements. It's just a thing some people do, copying the way their friends move without even realising they're doing it.

 

"Yeah," Steve agrees, sounding tired and worn-down and determined. "Yeah, there's... always us." Then he catches Tony's eye again, and smiles. "You would assume you knew better than Fury, all of SHIELD, the Pentagon and the League - I mean, the UN. There's always us."

 

"Will you speak to Fury of this?" asks Thor.

 

"No," Tony and Steve say simultaneously.

 

"What he doesn't know he can't put a stop to," says Steve. "Never tell your CO anything you don't have to." He grins.

 

"Sounds suicidal to me," says Tony. "Knowledge is power, so never make anyone as wise as yourself - that was what my Mom used to say."

 

"We can't hang around sabotaging every aspect of SHIELD that we don't like forever. He'll work it out eventually," says Steve.

 

"It's not sabotage," says Tony. "It's an agreement among ourselves that there are some aspects of what Fury does that we're opposed to, and that we'll let him know what those things are as and when they come up in conversation." He grins. "With any luck the people who thought Phase Two was a good idea will be phased out by then."

 

"If there's an award for worst puns ever, you've just won it," says Steve.

 

"It's always nice to be highly thought of by Captain America."

 

"Is that what you think just happened?"

 

Tony laughs. He's won the prize, him and Bruce, without a single hitch; Steve can have a round or two, and besides, he's right, it was a terrible joke. Tony has far, far better ones.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHAHAHA, I finally feel like this thing has Closure. Ignore Everything The Woman Behind The Green Curtain Says About Patent Law, because there is such a thing as time-limitation of claims, Dorothy.

Tony's gone twenty years without getting a phone call (distraught, drunk or otherwise) from Rumiko Fujikawa in the middle of the night, so when a second one happens less than six months after the first he's appropriately wary of it.  
  
Or would be, if he were more than half awake.   
  
" _What_?" he snaps into the receiver, trying to untangle himself from a knot of sheets long enough to sit up. It's not working well. This is what he gets for saying _no Pep I'll stay here you have fun in Houston_ instead of going with her: phone calls at three in the morning and a bed he's forgotten how to sleep in when he's the only occupant.   
  
"Hi, Tony, how are you?" Rumiko says dryly.  
  
"What? Ru, d'you even care what time it is over here?"  
  
"No," she says, amused. "The Tony I remember didn't much care, either."  
  
"The Tony you remember drowned himself in a toilet bowl right after we broke up and hasn't been seen since," Tony mutters. It's sort of true.   
  
"So listen," she says. "A funny thing happened yesterday."  
  
Her tone's calm and the words would be innocuous if they were properly friends, but she was here for the anniversary of his parents' deaths and she called him the morning before her wedding, the clear implication on both sides being that they were _through_ : chapter closed, peace made, lives moving on.   
  
For fuck's sake, she sent him back his Captain America action figures.  
  
"So," says Tony, fully awake and tempted to call for the armour, just because.  
  
"So," she says. "I was approached by SHIELD's Japanese offices the other day."  
  
"They do that," says Tony. "Approach people."  
  
"They asked me about some tech they had."  
  
"Hmmph," says Tony. "I thought you gave up proper work decades ago."  
  
He really doesn't like where this is going.  
  
"They wanted my R&D people to go over it."  
  
Holy uncommunicative ex-girlfriends, it's like drawing teeth or something, does he really need to comment on each individual sentence before the next one comes out of her mouth, what the fuck is going on here. Tony decides he can't be bothered with that and lets the silence stretch instead.   
  
Finally Rumiko sighs. "It was guns," she says. "Weapons. Energy sources I'd never seen before. It occurred to me that you probably had, and I thought maybe I should call you, and then I thought it was none of my business, and it still isn't, except that Fujikawa Industries does not work with weapons tech, we never have, and the only reason they'd bring that shit to me was if you'd refused it, and moreover they knew that if they took it to anyone else in the States - FNG, or anyone - you'd know about it."  
  
"So they hit up my ex-girlfriend," says Tony.  
  
"Ex being the operative word," says Rumiko.  
  
"True."  
  
"Tony, the firepower that stuff potentially held - it was scary. Whatever this project is, I don't want my company involved. Ever."  
  
"Ru," he says, hearing a familiar note in her voice. "Are you drunk?"  
  
She laughs. "I got a right to be. I've turned down a huge UN-sponsored contract and am breaking all my confidentiality obligations by mouthing off to my college boyfriend, who, being not merely my college boyfriend but also Tony fucking Stark, is probably going to head straight to SHIELD tomorrow morning and do something that'll let the whole world know he got his intel from me -"  
  
"Hey," says Tony, affronted. "I can be subtle."  
  
Rumiko laughs until she cries, which makes him smile.  
  
"Trust me," he says.  
  
"Why else am I calling you?" she says, and hangs up.  
  
*********  
  
"No, no, wait, let me just go over this again, make sure I've got this straight, I understand you, yadda yadda," says Rhodey.   
  
Tony folds his hands neatly on the table top and assumes an expression of innocent interest.   
  
"You want me to use my admittedly impeccable Air Force clearance to get into the SHIELD databases and find out if they've been asking Rumiko to build Phase Two for them."  
  
"Correct."  
  
"And you can't do this yourself because..."  
  
"Fury's trying to keep me out of the loop. He'll have someone checking for any sign of _me_ going snooping."  
  
"Tony," says Rhodey. "I have been your best friend for nearly thirty years. For a not insignificant portion of those thirty years, I have been your _only_ friend."  
  
"You have a reputation," says Tony.  
  
"You collect reputations."  
  
"For standing up to me."  
  
"Captain America has a reputation for standing up to you."  
  
"Captain America suggested I ask you to do it. Which is the sort of vote of confidence that ought to have your fanboy ass in paroxysms."  
  
Rhodey glares. "Bullshit excuses," he says. " _I_ _know_ what this is about. This is about that thing with the _killerbots_ , you're trying to _get back_ at me -"  
  
"Oh, _please_ , I'm an _adult_ now I would not _stoop_ to that, Rhodey -"  
  
"Adult, adult, don't make me laugh, your alcoholic ass has never been anywhere close to adult -"  
  
"My alcoholic ass - shut up, shut up! - my alcoholic ass is asking you for a favour, sweetheart, does thirty years of friendship mean nothing to you, is this really -"  
  
"It's nice to see you two have been getting along since I've been gone," says Pepper from the kitchen doorway.  
  
"Pepper, back me up!" Tony yells.  
  
"Pepper, tell him, this is bullshit and I won't do it," Rhodey demands.  
  
Pepper drops her bag and sighs. "Tony, what've you done now?"  
  
"Nothing!"  
  
"That's true," says Rhodey. "That's actually true. It was Rumiko."  
  
"Somehow I don't find that very reassuring."  
  
"Ru's all right," says Tony, feeling an obscure need to defend her.  
  
"Ahahahaha," says Pepper. " _Coffee_."  
  
He slides off his seat and kisses her instead. She curls her hands into his shirt and slumps a bit, tired, not really up for this; Rhodey's groaning, Tony flaps a hand at him behind his back: go away.   
  
"I'll leave you to it," says Rhodey.   
  
"This conversation is not over," says Tony.  
  
"Yes it is, because I'm not doing it," says Rhodey. "Go hack SHIELD yourself."  
  
*********  
  
Three days later Rhodey is lying over a table in the workshop, clutching desperately at a bottle of Pepper's favourite red wine.   
  
"I'm dead," he says. "I've had it. My ass is grass. I'll be court-martialed by the end of the month." He sits up long enough to point an accusing finger at Tony. "If that actually happens, I expect an apartment in this place at least as nice as the one Barton's got. _At least_."  
  
"Every time you come by here I offer you a floor," Tony says, indignant.  
  
"If I could get you kids to focus on the relevant matter for just a second?" says Steve.  
  
"No," says Tony promptly.  
  
"How is my impending court martial not relevant?"  
  
Steve bangs a hand, irritatedly, against his knee. "Did you or did you not have the clearance to view those files?"  
  
" _Clearance_ , but no _reason_ -"  
  
"And is there any particular reason why anyone at SHIELD or the Air Force would be stalking your computer history?"  
  
Rhodey gives Tony a meaningful look.   
  
"Well," Steve admits. "You've got a point there."  
  
Tony flips him off. "But what did you find?"  
  
Rhodey sighs. "They're going over Fury's head with it," he says. "At least, that's what it looks like. Someone's given him direct orders."  
  
"The Council?"  
  
Rhodey shrugs.  
  
"Doesn't matter," says Steve. "The important question is, what can we do about it?"  
  
"Well, how about nothing," says Rhodey. "It's so far over my head -"  
  
"Not mine," Tony says. "Not mine."  
  
*********  
  
It's Howard's discovery; it's weapons tech, that Tony refuses to build, that he refuses to condone, or be associated with. It's goddamn Nazi technology, and thinking of that makes Tony remember, a scene from his childhood: he's slinking along the hall, aiming for the kitchen - hungry? Was it daytime, maybe midafternoon? - and Howard's study door is open.  
  
"- care what the fuck the agencies have to say about it," Howard said, face tight with fury. Is this the first time Tony's heard someone swear? Might well be. He's not sure how old he was. Not seven yet. Maybe not even five yet. "I won't have that fucking Nazi in my house, Maria. I'll kill him if he comes near us. I really will."  
  
"I'm starting to understand why you won't work with Nasa," said Maria dryly. "Howard, I've not invited him - I won't. Pour me another and calm down."  
  
Just a flash, a moment in time burned into Tony's mind: the open door, Mom in her chair, legs crossed and hair loose, Dad pacing around his desk, agitated and angry. He slips onwards on socked feet to the kitchen, more interested in cookies than in his parents' conversation, but years later he remembers it, and thinks that they were probably talking about Wernher von Braun.   
  
He's reading at his official desk, R&D reports, a patent application, funding suggestions for projects. He keeps on having to put the papers down to remember Howard's white, angry face. Does it expiate his crimes that he built what he built for the right reasons? Does it make him less of a murderer that all his life he hated fascists and torturers and the irresponsibility of scientists -   
  
\- Scientists like Tony, more interested in what they could do than in whether or not they should do it.  
  
Like father, like son: a Merchant of Death, cheating himself into believing he had principles, he was in the right.  
  
How did Fury get his hands on the Tesseract anyway, if it was Howard who fished the thing out of the ocean? Tony might not ever have known his Dad as well as some did, but he knows him well enough to know they are excruciatingly alike, and Tony would break up with Pepper before he willingly handed the Tesseract to a guy like Fury, and yeah baby, this is a _plan_.   
  
Tony fucking Stark has a plan.  
  
Summarised, it goes like the great majority of all his other plans. Attack.  
  
*********  
  
But, he thinks later. Fury always had all his money on the Avengers Initiative. He said so himself. He was no fonder of Phase Two than I am. And Rhodey said they were going over his head with it.  
  
Right?  
  
Hmm.  
  
*********  
  
"But," says Thor, eyes narrowed. "In order for this legal trickery to work, my father would have had to have invented the Tesseract?"  
  
"The man's a God from another planet," says Tony flippantly. "Who's going to seriously try and disprove it after two thousand years?"  
  
"I mislike this perjury," says Thor.  
  
"I mislike those guns," says Tony.  
  
Thor grins. "You have a point there. What will happen to the weapons then?"  
  
Tony crosses his legs and leans back on the sofa and gives a sigh of heartfelt satisfaction. "If an invention was developed from an invention that was stolen off of you," he explains, "you, as the patent holder of the original invention. can have the court order the other inventions destroyed."  
  
*********  
  
He's not cruel enough to make the phone call where Steve might walk in on it.  
  
*********  
  
By the time Fury catches up with them they've loaded all the crates and are gathering data files and wiping computers. He bursts out onto the walkway above their heads, and Tony grabs a chair and jumps up onto it, flings his arms out, tilts his head back. The electric light flickers on his red sunglasses; he's wearing his Brass Rat and his favourite pale grey suit.   
  
"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks!"  
  
Fury pounds a fist on the railing of the walkway. "What the hell are you doing, Stark?"  
  
"Nick," says Tony, letting his arms fall again. "Nicky, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry you had to find out this way, Nick -" and he puts a sob into his voice, deep and hurt. "I love you, Nick, I do. But you're not the man I met three years ago. It's over, Nick! I'm leaving you, and I'm taking the kids! Don't - don't say anything, don't try to follow me. The divorce papers" - he reaches into his jacket, and draws out an envelope. "I'll leave the divorce papers right here."  
  
Fury's glaring, because he generally does glare at Tony, but Tony can tell that he's also kind of stumped right now, and has no idea what's going on, and oh, the Shakespeare was a nice touch, Pepper will love it.  
  
He puts his hands into his trouser pockets and smiles. "It's a court order," he says gently. "Patent infringements, foreign dignitaries, disgraceful conduct of government organisations in rifling through the possessions of the recently deceased while his son and sole legal heir, a mere boy of seventeen, was prostrate with grief and utterly helpless to stop you wandering into Howard's labs and nicking - heh, _nicking,_ that's a British thing, did you know? I am actually quoting Director Carter verbatim, in case you were wondering, anyway, _nicking_ the Tesseract he spent his life refusing to hand over to you."  
  
They watch each other in silence for a moment. Tony's triumphant; Fury's angry; both of them are enjoying the hell out of this.   
  
_Go thwart him_ , Director Carter had said, laughing. _He_ _always_ _was a melodramatic twat. Go give him a run for his money_. _You deserve each other_.  
  
Fury's hands clench on the railing, jaw set. "And I suppose," he says, "a detailed six page report in the New York Times about how a UN-funded spy operation is illegally building Nazi death rays if I try and stop you?"  
  
Tony sweeps him the lowest bow he can without his sunglasses falling off.  
  
Fury leaves without another word.  
  
"It is the east, and Juliet is the sun," says Tony, feeling self-satisfied. "Oh, to be a glove upon that hand! Hmm. I wonder what Pepper's favourite Shakespeare is?"  
  
As it turns out, it is _Romeo and Juliet_. She's particularly fond of the Elizabethan dirty talk about palmer's kisses and bounties endless as the sea.   
  
Tony sees no reason to go into further detail on that.  
  



End file.
